How to load a PC when the cd drive is unavailable.

[Asol]

I have a disc set to load a computer with a certain configuration and I seem to have bricked it either skipping or ignoring steps while trying to multitask. Its a gov load involving a boot disc followed by a driver disk then an image disk then a couple apps disks. The image disk wouldn't read and may have been scratched or corrupted haven't used it since, attempting to restart from getting stopped in the ghost image portion left me apparently looking at a brick. On attempts to reload the driver step spontainiously demands a floppy now when the file is on a cd i have no floppys with the pc equipment or the specific load that has to go on it.

 

The HD is formated but i cannot load anything because the cdrom drive is 'unavailable' The system only boots past the bios which is passworded to find an invalid disk, i guess the cdrom is unavailable because i managed to delete device drivers without replacing them? It is odd because the bios sees the cdrom. I have some admining experience but am not strong on the A+ type stuff. The data is backed up to a server but i need to put the box back in service.

 

What is the best way to recover this thing?

 

Any help highly appreciated thanks

[Walsingham]

Could you plug in a CD drve via USB? I went that way when my main drives broke.

[Purkake]

You can also boot straight from a thumb drive.

[Humodour]

You can boat from the network. From a thumb drive. From an external USB CD drive. Borrow one from a friend if you don't want to buy one.

[Grimstad]

I've yet to successfully boot from a thumb drive however, the drivers for a kingston thumb drive are on a windows boot floppy. Boot from the floppy then run whatever you need from the thumb drive. It's got to be a Kingston thumb drive though. About $16 for 4 gigs at Fred Meyer. It's a common drive but not every store has it.

[Purkake]

You can boot of any thumb drive, you just need to make it bootable first, which can be pretty tedious.

[Gorgon]

The tutorials I have seen all include doing something with a floppy. Who the hell has a floppy these days.

[Purkake]

Yeah, that was a while back, nowadays you can just get a program that will do that for you.

 

Making a bootable linux thumbdrive for emergencies is really easy.

[Asol]

Thumb drives are non compliant for this and the one USB CDrom we had in the shop was in-op. I just settled to replace it with another PC on the network.

 

Thanks for the suggestions.

Edited February 12, 2010 by Asol